


A Beginning

by thegreyarea



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Gen, Original Character(s), Pre-Canon, Prologue
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-17
Updated: 2020-04-01
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:27:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23179975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegreyarea/pseuds/thegreyarea
Summary: A story that starts with a prologue, about a woman and her peculiar garden.(Fits in the SSSS Universe, but the first part does not includes any SSSS character).That is also the beginning of some strange events...
Comments: 6
Kudos: 10





	1. Prologue

Marie Grímsdóttir’s day had been a happy one.

She had finally completed her new garden, one of her dearest dreams since retiring from her mildly successful career as an Art History teacher at Reykjavik. But it was no simple garden, it was a Stave Garden! She had coaxed her long-time neighbour, Olaf, shamelessly putting her many culinary talents to good use, into using his tractor to help her move all the rocks and plants accordingly, creating a large circle embellished with many runes and a large round pond in the centre.

The plan, she recalled, had also come from a dream, a strange dream of an infinite calm ocean where she saw that stave. It wasn’t that strange, she thought back then, to dream of staves and runes. After all she had loved them her whole life and taught about them in her classes! That morning, many years ago, she woke up and jumped to her desk, grabbing a pencil and sketching that beautiful stave.

She had to rebuff some advances from dear Olaf, who clearly thought she had more in mind than just the making of a garden. He even insisted in decorating the border of the pond with more runes. The man knew nothing about runes though, which left her with a sorry mess, the poor symbols barely recognizable in their twisted new “versions” …but that was a minor inconvenience, albeit an irritating one. She vowed to ask for his help in correcting them later, maybe even tomorrow. After all, the man _was_ very nice, and educated, and in quite good shape for someone well into his sixties…

She was alone in her large property, a farm far removed from everything which she inherited from her grandmother, enjoying the final moments of daylight as the sun had just set behind her new garden, when she saw something approaching from the North, moving fast in the dark blue sky. Marie watched in awe as a big, flattened oval halted right above the pond. And halt was the right word, she thought. That thing didn’t decelerate or make a sound. One second it was flying fast as an airplane, and then it was there, wingless, standing still in the chilly afternoon air, refusing to acknowledge gravity.

The object had a polished silver surface, now reflecting the great circle of the garden, and Marie, below. In that reflection, she stared amazed as the pond surface, completely flat moments ago, began to glow softly and ripple, first subtly and then with growing intensity. She moved towards the pond, captivated by that impossible undulation, like the water was being hit by a powerful, yet soundless music.

Then, faster than she could react, something large rose from the shallow pond, reaching for the floating object above it in the blink of her incredulous eyes. She could see a black mass of curved forms embracing the oval. “It looks like an octopus capturing its prey”, she thought, as two of those dark tentacles hit the silvery surface, cracking the otherwise plain skin. The dark figure slithered two other tentacles into the crack.

Marie watched as the object shuddered and could sense that something was wrong, but she was too fascinated by the ongoing struggle happening right over her garden to consider her own safety. It was like those wild life documentaries that she loved watching. She was sure that the dark octopus (though it had far more than eight tentacles, didn’t it?) was a predator, one that had just succeeded in capturing its prey. In front of her the pond water was still moving, and she wondered if that thing hunted in packs.

Her rational mind stepped in for a second to question how any of this was possible, but her thoughts were interrupted by a flash of blinding light that hurt her eyes. The great black mass fell from the hoovering object. Most of it hit the ground, but two tentacles, severed from the main bulk, fell in the water, immediately sinking.

She could see the insides of the object through the large fissure. There were blues, reds and small flashes that flickered in a spectrum of colours. The flashes were also visible in some kind of fluid that oozed from the cut, spewing over the inert mass of the octopus (why does she keep calling it an octopus? There were no octopi like that, much less in the shallow pond that Olaf filled with water days ago).

Then it came back to her. A vision brought back from her childhood. It was _not_ a dream, it happened at noon, and she was standing in that exact place, waiting for her grandmother to call her for lunch. In her vision a silver bird flew over water, until a black snake lurched from the water and bit the bird. But the bird, with a fast move, cut off the snake’s head. It fell back in the water and the bird flew away, bleeding. So many years had passed without a single thought of that vision… After their lunch she’d retold it to her grandmother, who’d looked at her uncommonly serious for a bit, and then hugged her, saying she had visions like that too, that she shouldn’t worry and that the vision meant no matter how hard the problem, even if we were hurt, one day all will be well again.

Approaching the margin, Marie looked below the surface. She squinted to see better through the water, there was so little light outside, but in the depths (how? It’s less than a meter deep!) there was light. After a few seconds she could see it better and then, however hard to believe, she was looking right at the dark ocean from her dream. Something moved bellow. No, many things moved, and she realized that an undefined number of dark octopi were coming towards her. And they had eyes, many red cruel eyes. She took a step back, but not out of fear. She knew, somehow, it wasn’t her they were after, they were coming for the wounded floating object above her.

Marie looked up in time to see the object moving towards the sunset, not as fast as it had arrived, but still fast enough to be small as a faraway bird when it dropped behind it a dot of light. The dot moved back towards the garden. She heard the waters stirring and knew that the dark things had arrived, but her eyes were set on the bright dot as it got closer and closer and, suddenly, that light was everything.

***

_Iceland News, May 29, 1964_

_The case investigation on the mysterious explosion that obliterated Marie Grímsdóttir’s farm and raised public concern was closed yesterday, when more than a month after the incident no conclusion was reached, leaving police investigators, scientists and local residents alike, frustrated and confused._

_Since the event, in the late hours of April 24th, many theories were conjured for the possible causes of what many are calling “Iceland’s Small Tunguska”. Despite all efforts, that included the collaboration of American specialists, it was impossible to find any clues towards the causes, and the last remaining theory revolves around an air blast from a hypothetical meteorite that exploded before hitting the ground, just above the farm, levelling everything in a 2km radius. Only the isolation of the place limited the death toll to a single person, the owner, a former Art History teacher from Reykjavik._

_However, a neighbour and friend of the deceased, Olaf Bergsson, insists that he saw “a kind of airplane” over his property, some 7 Km away, moments before the explosion, and that it dropped a bomb, which he described as “brighter than the Sun”._

_Officials dismissed the claims, assuring that they found no evidence to support them on site, adding that careful examination also failed to detect any kind of radiation, which discards the “lost tactical nuke” hypothesis that some careless newspapers promoted. A source also informed us that Mr. Bergsson has showed some strange behaviour since the event, blaming himself and stating that it was all related to some garden._

_Mrs. Grímsdóttir’s son refused to comment the outcome of the investigation, and the location of her former husband, that lives in the USA since their divorce, is currently unknown._

_With this decision made and quickly dwindling public attention, captured by the consequences of the Alaskan earthquake and tsunami,_ _the continuous_ _Surtsey_ _eruptions_ _and the mounting tension in Vietnam, it seems that the events transpired on Marie Grímsdóttir’s farm will remain a mystery._


	2. First Contact

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A short story where one Mikkel Madsen must find a way to do his job.

Mikkel Madsen’s day had been a… complicated one.

Just a few hours ago he’d been in Vegas, enjoying his well-earned break after a successful mission in Mexico. Everything was perfect. He’d lost money, of course, that’s what casinos are for. But he’d had a good time, which included a delightful conversation with an equal parts intelligent and beautiful woman from San Francisco. He even managed to get her name and the hotel she was staying at.

He sat in one of the bar stools at the Casino, enjoying a drink and a cigar while he planned his next move. Mikkel’s imagination was already conjuring pleasant images of fun days in Bay City with lovely, charming company, when the bar phone rang. Soon the barman was asking for him, and he had the nagging intuition that his plans were about to be postponed.

It was his boss, of course it was. Who else in the agency (or in the world, he thought) would call him at that hour in the night? The colonel wasn’t happy. Something big happened, and they had to act at once before things spiralled out of control. After all that’s why Special Circumstances existed. And Mikkel was the closest agent, arguing would be pointless. So he paid his tab and emptied his drink, grabbed his trench coat, put the Fedora on and left the Casino on a cab, telling the driver to hurry to Nellis Air Force Base.

There was a jet already waiting for him, engines on. It was a short flight, but enough to give Mikkel almost an hour with his thoughts. He was getting tired of his job. Yes, it paid well, and there were privileges, like good hotels and nice clothes, but there is also no limit to when they can call him, or what they can demand. Anyway, better than any job he had before, and they had been many, he recalled.

After the war he spent upwards to twelve years being fired from a lot of things, wandering as aimlessly as his notorious incapacity to hit the broadside of a barn right in front of him. But it was that lack of aim that left him out of the front line, helping the doctors in a campaign hospital in some Filipino island. One busy day he’d been the only one left to help a young officer caught by three Japanese bullets. And he saved the guy. They bumped into each other years later at a bar. But the young officer had become an important man and proceeded to offer him a job, a job that required people in which he could trust beyond any shadow of a doubt.

The plane landed. When Mikkel stepped outside there was another angry colonel waiting for him (why were all the officers around him always angry, he wondered) with a car, a map, and orders to do anything Mikkel said. Well, he could understand that one. It wasn’t easy for a high-ranking officer to accept taking orders from a younger man dressed like someone in charge of an advertising agency or such.

They crossed the White Sands missile range North. A nearly full moon bathed the landscape in an ethereal glow. It felt like forever until they finally reached a small ranch where two soldiers and a civilian waited outside. The civilian, according to the colonel, was former military, and called the base as soon as he got home from hunting. Lucky us, Mikkel thought. If the man had called the local police the place would be swarming with all kinds of people, including reporters, and that would be a nightmare to deal with.

Mikkel was extremely curious to see what the man “hunted” and whether it really justified all the rush. He ordered the soldiers to block the solitary lane that connected the ranch to the main road and asked the old man to lead them to whatever he had found. He hoped that it wasn’t dangerous, seeing as he was the only one carrying a gun (which, _he_ knew, was much more useful to make an impression than anything else. But usually _others_ didn’t). However, he had to put aside any wish to call for more personal. In his line of work the less witnesses the better.

It was a short ride. They walked under the moonlight to the top of a soft sloping hill and the old farmer pointed to the small valley bellow. Mikkel could see a clearly defined shape in the middle of the scrub-filled plain, a flattened oval that reflected the moon almost like a mirror. Damn, he thought, as soon as the sun rises this thing is going to shine so bright that anyone around will notice. Also, it seemed that at least some of those reports about unidentified objects were serious. Now he had to find out the truth, and a way to hide it.

He ordered both men to stay back while he took a closer look. The colonel winced at such a direct order and was about to complain, but Mikkel’s don’t-argue-with-me look was enough to convince him. He walked downhill, the sound of his footsteps crushing small stones suddenly very loud in the silent valley. It would be a good time, he thought, to be using military boots instead of elegant Oxford shoes.

Approaching cautiously, he observed that the object wasn’t very big. About twelve meters long, four wide and almost three high (his Danish father never quite understood American’s passion for Imperial measures and neither did he). It stood about a meter above ground on three ridiculously thin legs. Two things were clear to Mikkel. First, that this thing with no wings or engines was not American and neither was it Russian, Chinese, or from any other place on this planet. The second thing was that his job was now in danger, because he couldn’t, for the life of him, think of a single thing to do with it, and his boss was not the kind to take excuses.

Mikkel walked slowly around it. On the opposite side, to his surprise, the flawlessly smooth surface had a large gash and, bellow that, a small figure lay on the ground. He came closer, trying to peek inside the spaceship (it had to be a spaceship, right? Like the ones in the science fiction magazines he loved) and found a tangled mess of cables and strange structures, all bathed in reds and blues. Faint lights of many colours flickered and he could see another small… what? Person? They had four limbs and a head, but the proportions simply weren’t right. He decided to just call them ETs. There was a pressing heat and an acrid smell coming from the gash, and the nearby vegetation was completely dry. He needed to find a solution before a fire started and made everything even more complicated.

Suddenly he saw movement. The small ET was trying to get up on its four limbs. Mikkel noticed that its suit was torn in several places, showing glimpses of brownish skin. Trembling, it stretched one limb towards the fissure (and that… arm did _stretch_ , doubling its length in a second, as if Mikkel needed any additional proof that those were _not_ humans). He was already under the hull’s curve, trying to get a batter look, when its head turned to face him. Behind a visor, two pairs of eyes of different colours looked back. Then a shudder rocked its limbs and the delicate body fell to the ground.

Mikkel tried to come closer but his shoulder hit the ship’s curved hull. It hurt, but to his amazement the whole thing moved aside! He was a strong, well-built man, but he just couldn’t believe that. Checking that the ET remained on the ground, he used his shoulder to push the huge bulk, and it moved again, as if he were pushing a car that ran out of battery. He studied the thin legs to confirm the theory that started to take shape in his head. They barely touched the ground, leaving almost no indentation. He tried again to push the ship, but upwards, and smiled as it moved satisfactorily up. The displacement, somehow, prompted that strange (what _wasn’t_ strange in all this?) landing gear to retract inside the hull, leaving the ship simply floating in the air.

An idea flashed in his head. Maybe he wouldn’t lose his job today after all. He cautiously poked the ET on the ground. It remained motionless. No success without risk, he thought, as he came closer and grabbed the body as softly as possible, taking care not to touch the exposed flesh. It wasn’t heavy, maybe like a big dog. Ignoring the heat and the smell he advanced to the opening and carefully deposited the (unconscious? dead?) ET inside the ship. Too bad he wouldn’t be able to claim to be the one who made humanity’s first contact with an alien. That would be a fantastic conversation starter.

Back at the car he talked to the colonel, asking if there were any nearby, isolated places to where they could move the ship. He didn’t know, but the old man talked about a cave that was used, decades ago, for storage. It was close to the base, which made it perfect. They wanted to know what that thing was, and he went with the customary tale of the less you know the better, national security and so on. After a few minutes he was convinced that they wouldn’t talk but warned them anyway that his agency (let them think we’re FBI, he thought, it’s best to remain under the radar) would be watching their every move from now on. Then he told them his plan.

Predictably, they counted him as crazy, but ultimately agreed to help. Half an hour later Mikkel was regretting that he would never again be able to use a different great line in a date. But, better thinking, what kind of woman would believe him if he told them that he once drove a car beneath the moonlight, in the middle of the desert, towing a floating spaceship?

It took them barely twenty minutes to reach the cave, but they were an _exceptionally_ _tense_ twenty minutes, particularly in the beginning, when Mikkel was afraid that some gust of wind would hit the huge volume behind them and throw them off the road, but he soon realized that the ship was somehow impervious to the winds, which left him only to worry about being seen by someone.

The cave was perfect. It was in a small canyon, had a large opening and was deep enough to swallow the ship. It even had some wooden doors attesting to its past use as a kind of warehouse. A faint number, 13, was painted on the door. Mikkel made a mental note to bet on that the next time he gambled on the roulette. He checked the ETs before closing the doors. At least the one that he’d pushed inside seemed to be alive, small movements rocking its body.

But that was no longer his problem. Mikkel had already radioed his agency from the car and would wait, as SCA protocol demanded, for the arrival of more agents. He sent the colonel to drive the farmer back home and then to his base, warning them, again, to speak not a word of what they had seen. Now, back against the warehouse door, he watched the landscape and lit a cigar. Well, _that_ had been a complicated day, and the tiredness was beginning to hit him hard. At least he was safe from his boss’s anger.

Anyway, she won’t be his boss for much longer. That incident was more than enough for Mikkel. He was already tired of running to solve this world’s problems, and now he was expected to deal with problems from other worlds? No, he would quit as soon as possible, and nobody would be surprised. The average time an agent worked for SCA was six years, and he was already in his eighth. He would take his savings and move to a small town, or maybe even back to his father’s homeland in Bornholm, get himself a cat, find a smart (and pretty) woman to fall in love with, have a couple of kids and lead a calm life, free of emergencies, aliens and bad-tempered bosses.

That last thought brought back the memory of his boss. She had quite a temper, our colonel Sigrun Eide. Being Chief of Operations on an agency _and_ a woman was a testament to that. Yet some _noted_ that she was also the daughter of a (recently retired) top-notch Norwegian Admiral and that NATO may have something to do with her fast climb up the ranks... Mikkel took pity on anyone who dared to raise _that_ matter. The last one, he heard, still limped and was enjoying a long stay somewhere near the North Pole. That woman was a powerhouse, and a redhead (he loved redheads)! But he’d had his fair share of talks with her and soon realized that, even if she wasn’t married, he never stood a chance. That amazing woman was way out of his league. Maybe in another life...

***

_New Mexico Times, April 25, 1964_

_A couple travelling from Las Cruces to Santa Fe claim to have witnessed a particularly strange event. According to Mr. and Ms. Newman they had stopped for a brief rest on a side road and were enjoying a cigarette when they saw a large, strange object moving slowly and very close to the ground. They described it as oval shaped, and ver_ _y reflective, “almost like a mirror”. It moved South for a few minutes until a nearby hill cut their line of sight. Mr. Newman claims that it could be the same object several people have reported spotting near Socorro,_ _yesterday, although that object is said to have departed the area flying high and fast._

_The White Sands command was contacted but had no information on the topic, denying any operations from the Army or Air Force in the area in the la_ _st 24 hours. The nearest resident, a retired Army officer, claimed that it was a calm night with nothing out of the ordinary, and there are currently n_ _o other reports or witnesses._

_It would seem the whole UFO topic has gained quite the mom_ _entum recently, although most scientists dismiss those events as a combination of popular imagination and misinterpretations of military activities or natural phenomen_ _a. In any case, if you believe you saw anything that might help explain the recently_ _reported events please send us a letter or contact our local offices._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A clarification about the Characters:
> 
> This is NOT an Alternate Universe in which Mikkel and Sigrun lived in the past.
> 
> The Mikkel Madsen in this story is a lot (sideburns included) like the Y90 Mikkel, but was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, in 1925, son of a Danish man and an American woman. He was 19 in 1944, when he fought in the Pacific, and almost 40 in 1964, when this story takes place. It seems that he did leave the SCA, found his way back to Denmark and had at least one son, who he named Michael Madsen and who was also more or less 40 when he met a certain Signe Sorensen in a boat to Bornholm.
> 
> The Sigrun Eide in this story is also a lot like “our” Sigrun from Y90, but was born in Everett, Washington, USA in 1928, daughter of a Norwegian Admiral (it seems that command runs in the blood of this family) who fell in love with an American in his youth. She is 36 in 1964, perhaps too young to have a colonel rank, but I won’t ask her about that (my dear reader can try. Good Luck). Her parents got married and she was raised in Norway.  
> Sigrun moved to the USA again when she married (don’t cry, M+S shippers! Remember, this is not our Sigrun) an American, also with family ties in Norway, from whom she adopted “Eide” as her last name. Later she had kids, and some of them returned to their homeland, Bergen. After her husband died, in 2010, she decided to live there too, in a small cosy house with her cat. She was 85 (but in good shape) when she received a phone call from her grandson, Aksel Eide, asking her to move to Dalsnes...
> 
> General notes:
> 
> This is a fan-made story based in the amazing work of Minna Sundberg, Stand Still Stay Silent (www.sssscomic.com) and is dedicated, as usual, to her.
> 
> “First Contact” is the second part of “A Beginning”. The first part, “Prologue” can be found here:
> 
> https://archiveofourown.org/works/23179975/chapters/55484107
> 
> Some events, locations and organizations referred in this story were imported from/inspired by the real world, like an UFO sighting known as the “Lonnie Zamora incident” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonnie_Zamora_incident) or the “White Sands Missile Range” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Sands_Missile_Range), but all characters are completely fictional. Any resemblance with real people is mere coincidence. (I’ve always wanted to write this!).
> 
> The “Special Circumstances Agency” name is, as Ian M Banks readers would easily guess, a homage to his brilliant Culture series.
> 
> Please don’t post on other sites without permission.  
> Any feedback will be greatly appreciated. You can reach me at [my username]@inorbit.com

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fan-made story based in the amazing work of Minna Sundberg, Stand Still Stay Silent (www.sssscomic.com) and is dedicated, naturally, to her.
> 
> Special thanks to Jitter, whose comments in the SSSS Forum* inspired this story, and also to my daughter, who agreed, again, to proofread my work with previous knowledge of how bad I am, and also managed to provide suggestions and unyielding support, as usual.
> 
> *: On “What the Heck is the Rash, anyway?” https://ssssforum.com/index.php?topic=1113.0  
> Please don’t post on other sites without permission.
> 
> Any feedback will be greatly appreciated. You can reach me at [my username]@inorbit.com
> 
> Edit: I added recently a small reference to the Surtsey eruptions and the tension in Vietnam at the end of the newspaper report because those were very relevant events in 1964.


End file.
